What's in a name?

[gchristie]

Never took a Latin course in my life, so I'm freely showing my ignorance here. But curious, why this particular spelling for the name of the game? I've seen three different iterations of the Latin form of Caesar's quote (from my extensive research of, um, a very quick Google search). There are:

1. Alea iacta est
2. Alea Jacta Est (en: "The Dice Is Cast") is the third studio album by the Austrian power metal band WarCry, released on January 1, 2004
3. Iacta alea est


So, are the Phils major WarCry fans, or is there another reason they picked this particular spelling?

[Metalist]

Maybe others didn't sound cool enough

Wiki says "Alea iacte est": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_iacta_est

[yellow ribbon]

Maybe others didn't sound cool enough

Wiki says "Alea iacte est": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_iacta_est

has been discussed since game was announced in public:

a.) there was the question whether french dont have the letter "I" [color="#FFFF00"]since Romans didnt even know "J"[/color]

b.) so you will find plenty of sources, greek original texts 50-100 years older than the questionable sources, which put even in doubt that he said it at all.

c.) you will find also historical evidence that it has nothing to do with casting dices, but rather a kind of "all consequences has been considered" since it was a reply, not just uttering...

fortunately no one of us was there, wiki is not the best source and "...Iacta est" is already a old game

[Bertram]

Latin didnt have the J in their script, they used the i for both the i and j sounds. So they would write iacta, but we would write jacta for the same prononciation. I guess using Jacta is easier on people unfamiliar with Latin.
Using all capitals as first characters in titels is something English/American. I think Romans would have used all capitals (for all characters) on inscritions and the like, or only capitals at the start of a sentence when writing something like a book.
(of course when they made longer inscriptions they used more abreviations then a 12 year old on twitter - you really need to know the customs to make sense of them).

[Pocus]

when was invented the uppercase / lowercase differenciation?

I don't know the answer, but that must be one hell of difficult answer to find I believe...

[koningtiger]

Some latin writings don´t have a point between sentences at all, some writers began to put a point over the firts word of a sentence to show that is a new sentence. Not sure if its about sentences or words, perhaps at that times all was written joint.

[Le Ricain]

it may be also worth pointing out that in Latin, there is no 'U' as the letter 'V' does double duty, eg IVLIVS (Julius).

[yellow ribbon]

when was invented the uppercase / lowercase differenciation?

I don't know the answer, but that must be one hell of difficult answer to find I believe...

not if you write all in bold letter like Romans or pictures like Egyptians

i see, if there will be any expansion for much earlier times, you will do better and hand in a manual in babylonian cuneiform script

[H Gilmer3]

Latin didnt have the J in their script, they used the i for both the i and j sounds. So they would write iacta, but we would write jacta for the same prononciation. I guess using Jacta is easier on people unfamiliar with Latin.

I knew this! I learned it from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he jumped on the "J" and almost fell through! He then says, "Idiot! In latin the first letter would be "I"!"

[StephenT]

when was invented the uppercase / lowercase differenciation?

In Charlemagne's time, as part of the Carolingian Renaissance.

What we know today as 'lower case letters' were developed in late Roman times as a way of writing on paper using a pen, that was easier than the square 'Roman' capital letters designed to be carved into stone. But for a long time you either wrote in all-capitals, or in the new cursive scripts - and there were lots of different local variations of them, and so by the 8th century AD a monk in France couldn't read Latin text written in Germany, and a monk in Italy couldn't read Latin text written in France, because the scripts used were so different.

Charlemagne thought that was a bad idea, and ordered his ministers to invent a single, clear style of handwriting that would be used for all books, laws and charters throughout his empire. They decided to use cursive ("lower case") letters for the body of the text, but important words such as the first line of each chapter and the first word in each sentence would be distinguished by writing them in Roman ("upper case") letters instead. The rules of capitalisation wouldn't be standardised until many centuries later, but that's when the original idea of mixing the two letter styles deliberately for stylistic effect in the same piece of writing was developed.



We can also thank Charlemagne for the practice of putting spaces between words, insteadofrunningallthewordstogetherwithnogaps.

[yellow ribbon]

In Charlemagne's time, as part of the Carolingian Renaissance.

What we know today as 'lower case letters' were developed in late Roman times as a way of writing on paper using a pen, that was easier than the square 'Roman' capital letters designed to be carved into stone. But for a long time you either wrote in all-capitals, or in the new cursive scripts - and there were lots of different local variations of them, and so by the 8th century AD a monk in France couldn't read Latin text written in Germany, and a monk in Italy couldn't read Latin text written in France, because the scripts used were so different.

Charlemagne thought that was a bad idea, and ordered his ministers to invent a single, clear style of handwriting that would be used for all books, laws and charters throughout his empire. They decided to use cursive ("lower case") letters for the body of the text, but important words such as the first line of each chapter and the first word in each sentence would be distinguished by writing them in Roman ("upper case") letters instead. The rules of capitalisation wouldn't be standardised until many centuries later, but that's when the original idea of mixing the two letter styles deliberately for stylistic effect in the same piece of writing was developed.



We can also thank Charlemagne for the practice of putting spaces between words, insteadofrunningallthewordstogetherwithnogaps.

that cries out for the next AGEOD game theme...